Told in the first person, Bani is telling his newborn son Kahlil the story of Bani’s life from his university graduation to Kahlil’s birth. To do otherwise would not only bring shame to his family but would also pollute the Alawites’s pure bloodline which can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad. The Other Half of You takes up Bani’s story after he graduated from university with an Arts degree and is now expected to marry but to only another Alawite. Bani is Lebanese and an Alawite Muslim in a country where ‘Lebs’ is a pejorative term – except in their own neighbourhood Lakemba. The Lebs told the story of Bani Adam as he negotiated issues such as cultural frictions, power dynamics, rape culture and toxic masculinity while he was a student at Punchbowl Boys High School in Western Sydney. In 2018, Michael Mohammed Ahmad won the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award for his novel The Lebs and, later that year, the novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
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